Episode 9 - 13th October 2015

10/13/15 • 2 min

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 13th of October 2015, some trending stories today are: TOP STORIES Author, Speaker, Futurist and CEO of Moven, Brett King announced at Sibos today that Moven raised US$ 12 Million in a Series B financing round led by Route 66 Ventures, bringing the total capital raised to US$ 25 Million. What started out as a mobile based PFM / wallet, is now more of a cooperative mobile app, that has licensed deals with banks in the regional countries Moven is operational. Good going Sir. Navi Ravikant, of AngelList has ventured East and won. The cofounder of AngelList has managed to secure US$ 400 Million from China! CSC Ventures, the US arm of China Science and Merchants Investment Management Group is pushing the private equity money to US and wants a piece of the action on all the potentials that AngelList can throw at them. Needless to say, this is going to shake a few trees on Sand Hill Road. Worldpay made its debut in UK on the London Stock Exchange, valuing the company at 4.8 Billion Pounds. Towards the end of the day, shares were trading at the debut price range. WorldPay has raised 2.5 Billion Pounds from the IPO. Twitter Cofounder & CEO Jack Dorsey is going to be giving the pink slips to about 8% of its global workforce under a new restructuring plan. J P Morgan Chase executive James Staley has been picked as the front-runner for the Barclays CEO position, a void left after former CEO Antony Jenkins left in wake of financial problems at the British Bank. Joining other countries, India and China are now issuing guidelines for taxi-hailing apps. BLOG OPINION Facebook’s new product called Canvas allowed users to tap on carousel format ads, and rather than be taken to the advertisers own website (which often takes time to load), product pages will load directly within Facebook. Yet another step closer for Facebook before it becomes the Shopify of the Internet world. E-Commerce is just around the corner. ONE LAST WORD... Microsoft now has 25 active money transmitter licenses in the US, my sources tell me an all new adaptive payment app is ready at Microsoft, just cannot be launched because not all the licenses are in (especially, NY, CA and TX). The app which will work with Skype and natively within Windows 10 and Windows Mobile has been in development for over two years internally within Microsoft. That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor.

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Episode 8 - 12th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 12th of October 2015, happy thanksgiving to all those listening in from Canada, to the rest, its Monday! Anyhow, here is what is trending today: TOP STORIES Dell agrees to buy EMC for US$ 67 Billion – the largest tech deal ever. Dell announced a few hours ago its intention to buy the corporate giant for software, storage and security as part of Dell’s transformation from the consumer PC business to an IT solutions provider for companies. SnapSwan, a cryptocurrency gateway that used to trade Ripple’s XRPs (without license I might add) was granted a license to provide services as a regulation Payment Institution (by Luxembourg). SnapSwan will now offer payments, remittances and currency exchange services in Europe.. UK’s VocaLink, the company behind UK’s Faster Payments has reason to celebrate. Thailand signed a deal with VovaLink for instant mobile payments. This is a big win for VocaLink which is also the front-end contender in countries like Singapore and Australia. The deal, announced at Sibos (Singapore today) is signed between VocaLink and Thailand’s interbank payment network: National ITMX. A point worth mentioning, this is a Letter of Intent that will explore the potential development of a real-time mobile payments system in Thailand. Oil rose slightly after Kuwait’s oil minister said OPEC forecasts more demand for oil next year, in face of removal of high-cost producers, who eventually would be removed from the production count, thus tightening up the global fuel balance. After the recent spate of hacking attacks (or disclosures – however you want to look at it), cyber insurance premiums have rocketed. Deductibles are being raised significantly and coverage caps are now being placed to US$ 100 Million by many insurance companies. Renewals have also been made prohibitively expensive. Don’t be expecting any sympathy from the insurance industry anytime soon. BLOG OPINION First there was the 2008 financial crisis. Then the European debt crisis (which still isn’t over by the way), now Goldman Sachs is saying, get ready for the third wave of financial crisis. Who does it affect? Emerging Markets, or EM-Wave as it is called. Now usually when an investment bank like Goldman Sachs lets this horse out in the open, the key word to understand is, losses have already been taken. ONE LAST WORD... Disruption it seems is difficult to accept. I bet at one point in time the buggy-whip manufacturers were up in arms over the introduction of something called the horseless carriage, i.e. the automobile. The same is being shown by cities and countries all over the world, who are trying to place clogs in the machinery, especially for the transportation sector, i.e. Uber and its fellow clones. After Paris, Australia has now cited it will block all taxi-hailing apps like Uber, iHail, etc. in Australia. It is only a matter of time when the consumers will put pressure on their local legislators to have such myopic decisions reversed. That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor.

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Episode 10 - 14th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 14th of October 2015, some trending stories today are: TOP STORIES Hyperledger, a Blockchain startup who’s co-founders are based out of China and the US, just got their first big break. At Innotribe in Singapore, Hyperledger won the $50,000 Innotribe startup prize. Hyperledger is a distributed ledger that allows banks and other financial institutions to clear and settle financial transactions in real-time. The hits just keep on coming, the US charity shop chain America’s Thrift Stores just reported a data-breach, as per a press-release, the hacks originated from somewhere in Eastern Europe. With a recent trademark filing by LG (Lucky Goldstar) for a product called GPay, there is now speculation if the Korean company would be entering the payments market and be offering payments on its mobile devices. A quick search of the NMLS database shows no money transmitter licenses awarded to LG. Goldman Sachs role in 1 Malaysia Development (1MDB) transactions are now being probed by the FBI and US Justice department. As you may recall 1MDB is the state development fund of Malaysia that is in trouble over its $11 Billion debt and payout to the standing Prime Minister of Malaysia. UK Jobless rate drops to pre-crisis levels to 5.4 percent, the lowest since early 2008. The data offers some assurance that the UK economy is growing despite the global slow down and market turmoil in China. JP Morgan Chase’s 3rd quarter earnings were mix, but there was good news on the mobile side of things. The US banking giant now reports that it has surpassed 22 Million active mobile customers. In the early morning today, its all red on the markets, everything seems to be down as investors digest earnings. BLOG OPINION There is a crisis brewing in Brazil, and everyone knows about it. Bloomberg has a great 3 series article that you must read on Brazil, why it is scaring bankers and wiping out jobs. It seems nothing is going right for the 9th largest economy in the world. STARTUP OF THE WEEK... The startup of this week is TawiPay, started by brothers Broid (Francois and Pascal) and their friend Laurent Oberholzer, the Swiss startup is all about money transfer (i.e. remittances). They offer a very nice comparison engine, along with a data observatory for all things money transfer. All the links referenced on this website can be accessed at faisalkhan.com/podcast. That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor.